It's been a rough few months for folks who bought the Wii U right at launch. Almost none of the third-party games that came out alongside Nintendo's new home console set the world on fire and the first-party offerings made by Nintendo didn't deliver a lightning-bolt success like Wii Sports. It's no wonder that Shigeru Miyamoto wishes that Pikmin 3 had been ready to debut along with the system.

If you look back at the launch of Wii, we were able to prepare a game like Wii Sports, which at the time was clearly a new game, and launch that alongside a Zelda game. With the Wii U, we took a similar approach by launching Nintendo Land as well as a Mario game—though we're working on Zelda for Wii U, that's going to take us a little big longer.

From my perspective, I think ideally it would have been nice if we'd been able to release Pikmin 3 closer to launch, but the Wii U—though it shares the Wii name—is obviously a brand new system, with new chips and graphical capabilities. It can do a lot more, and in the process of developing a lot of the features and functionality, the resources required to best utilize those features drew on some of the same resources that might have been spent developing games, thus we weren't able to bring quite as robust a lineup initially.

It's been a very slim January and February for Wii U owners, which makes events like the Rayman Legends delay all the more painful. Even though Nintendo has been candid about the bumpiness of its new system launch, it's still pretty rare to see its chief creative architect talk so frankly about what could have gone differently.